Looking Down, Beyond our Senses...

Enough about the looks, time to dig a bit deeper. Let's see what lies beneath the cooling system of the Gainward BLISS 8600 GTS Golden Sample graphics accelerator. We are taking a look under the hood by pulling of the cooling solution. As you know by removing the cooling system you are voiding the warranty of your graphics card. So, only for those who don't care about the warranty and want to see what's underneath, with proper handling the heatsink can be removed for whatever reasons. However we don't recommend it, but at the same time we wanted to share the real stuff that makes the GTS what it is today. Take into account that Gainward added a small seal to prevent you from removing the cooler, unless you break it and with that as well the warranty.

Once the screws are gone, the heatsink can be taken off and the full scale PCB sees the light. The main weight of the video card actually comes from the cooling solution, which is designed by Gainward. Most electronic components have been invisible from the start on the front side of the PCB. Only some smaller components were not covered by the heatsink. All other main components like the GPU, voltage regulators and memory chips can only be seen once the cooling solution was taken off. For the Gainward version that means that even more was covered than when using the NVIDIA reference cooling solution, but nonetheless the actual board layout is following the reference design.

The Gainward BLISS 8600 GTS is powered by the new G84 series line of graphics processors. The G84 core used is physically the same chip as you will find back on the GeForce 8600 GT video cards and features the unified shader technology, represented by the stream processors. The NVIDIA G84 chip uses an 80nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits and has been designed from scratch around the unified shader logic, which was introduced by the G80 core. The GeForce 8600 GTS core works at 725MHz operation speed, actually a bit higher clocked than the standard GTS which is set at 675MHz. This does already show that the G84 has quite some potential when it comes to unlock extra performance by a simple overclocking exercise.

	GeForce 8600 GTS	BLISS 8600 GTS GS
Core Speed	675MHz	725MHz
Memory Speed	2000MHz	2200MHz
Shader Clock	1450MHz	1550MHz
Stream Processors	32	32
Memory Size	256MB GDDR3	256MB GDDR3
Memory Interface	128-bit	128-bit
HDCP Support	Compliant	Compliant

With the introduction of the G8x GPU's we see a new era being kicked off which is all about the unified shader technology. To incorporate this within the GeForce 8600 series we see that NVIDIA has come up with the stream processors which can be used in a unified way as either vertex or pixel shader. That means that these are no longer fixed to just being a vertex or pixel shader, but their function changes according to the processing needs. With a unified GPU architecture some bottleneck between pixel, shader and geometric processing is reduced to a great extend. These stream processors have their own speed setting, which is called the shader clock. For the BLISS 8600 GTS the shader clock speed is set at 1550MHz, coming from the default 1450MHz setting for the reference design.

The Gainward BLISS 8600 GTS Golden Sample comes with four memory chips in total which are all located on the front side of the board. The memory chips are placed strategically around the G84 core. Each of these memory chips are cooled by the airflow generated by the fan on the black heatsink, which guides the air via the fins in a 360° area around the GPU. By cooling the memory chips via the generated airflow, it provides extra protection towards the lifetime of the chips in general. The ram chips are placed two by two and give a total of 256MB memory. The GT version has the same amount of chips, but these are lower graded chips which come at a much cheaper price tag.

With 256MB GDDR3 memory the Gainward BLISS 8600 GTS Golden Sample is well equipped for experiencing the full graphical power of current and upcoming gaming technology. It features Samsung branded GDDR3 memory which is running at 2.2GHz speed. These Samsung GDDR3 chips come marked as 1.0ns access time and are therefore rated at only 2.0GHz frequency and operating at 1.9V. Yes, indeed Gainward is already going over the rated frequency, but they know these chips are up for more. So what does that mean...no overclocking? Well, not at all as these Samsung memory chips are of the best quality you can get and can reach even 2.3GHz with a bit of luck. And maybe even more. These chips are known to go really fast and have quite some extra room for boosting the memory clock speed.